this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Question about Klipper and printer hardware. (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by seathru@lemm.ee to c/3dprinting@lemmy.world
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I have a Voxelab Aguila that I am about to install Klipper on. I also have a SKR E3 Turbo board left over from another printer.

Would it be worth installing the SKR board? Or will it not make any difference since the Pi is doing all the processing anyways?

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[–] fhein@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From what I can find on search engines, the Aquila probably has a 32 bit board, so from a "processing" perspective I think it would be equivalent to the E3 Turbo.

It seems a bit unclear what kind of stepper drivers the Aquila has, but some posts I found claim it has clone TMC2208. I believe the E3 Turbo has TMC2209 which should be more powerful, and supposedly is better for pressure advance. You can search for "tmc2208 vs tmc2209" if you want more opinions on if it's worth upgrading just for that.

I also believe the E3 Turbo will give you UART access to the stepper drivers. IIRC this allows you to configure each stepper motor for either stealthchop (less noise) or spreadcycle (more power) mode, so you could for example set the extruder stepper to spreadcycle.

The E3 Turbo has 5 stepper drivers while the Voxelab board only has 4, right? If you upgrade/mod your printer to dual Z it's nice to have each stepper on their own driver, or if you rebuild the printer to IDEX, but otherwise there's not much use for it.

[–] seathru@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the through reply. I had found some of those differences but didn't know what they were for. Sounds like it would be worth it just for the better drivers and extra inputs.

[–] fhein@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I would guess it ultimately depends on how much you're interested in modding, fine-tuning settings and calibrating the printer to perfection. If you only want to load a model and hit "print" then I guess you wouldn't notice much difference from just a mainboard swap. But since you're about to install Klipper, you probably have some interest in spending time optimising your printer :)

I've upgraded a lot of things on my printer, but not got to the mainboard yet so it still has TMC2208 driver hardwired in stealthchop mode. I never got much out of pressure advance while the printer was still in bowden mode, even with a BMG extruder which is much stronger than the stock extruder.. Can't say if it would've turned out better with TMC2209 drivers, but after modding the printer to direct drive I have no issue with pressure advance. Now the main reason I want to upgrade mainboard some day is that I would like a 5:th driver so I can do proper dual Z.

And a general Klipper recommendation, in case this is the first time you try it out; Resonance compensation is like magic, and it works perfectly fine calibrating it manually (i.e. without buying an ADXL). After calibration, I could increase acceleration to 4000 without visible ringing. For reference the default acceleration for Ender-sized bed slingers is usually 500, which IIRC can be upped to about 700-900 before you start to get ringing.. Not only does high acceleration make it print faster, but at least for me it had a bigger impact on corner quality than pressure advance ever had.